Abstract
Introduction
K-12 schools have always been literal and figurative sites of state-sanctioned violence against youth of Color, particularly for multiply marginalized Black youth. Designed as an institution and system of social control (Foucault, 1977; Meiners, 2016; Simmons, 2017), K-12 schooling has always been rooted in carceral practices, policies, and ideologies that surveil, criminalize, and punish multiply marginalized youth of Color. Education scholars have extensively documented the pervasive inequities in exclusionary school discipline against youth of Color in urban K-12 schools compared to their white peers (Gregory et al., 2010; Muñiz, 2021; Welsh & Little, 2018), particularly against Black girls, boys, and Black youth labeled with learning disabilities (Annamma et al., 2019; Morris, 2016; Sojoyner, 2016).
This reality in exclusionary school discipline exemplifies the intimate relationship between K-12 schooling and prisons, which has been termed the school-to-prison pipeline by various organizing and activist groups since the 1990s (Sojoyner, 2016). More recently, scholars have troubled the notion of a direct pipeline that funnels youth from K-12 schools into juvenile and later into adult detention facilities, instead, elucidating the intricate and overlapping linkages between these two institutions. This includes frameworks such as carceral continuums (Shedd, 2015), educational enclosures (Sojoyner, 2016), school-to-confinement pathways (Morris, 2016), and the school-prison nexus (Meiners, 2007), among others. For example, in defining the school-prison nexus, Meiners (2007) contends: Linkages between schools and prison are less a pipeline, more a persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads. The nexus metaphor while perhaps less “sexy” or compelling than the schoolhouse to jailhouse track, is more accurate as it captures the historic, systemic, and multifaceted nature of the intersections of education and incarceration (p. 31).
This nexus creates a vicious cycle of immediate and generational educational and socioeconomic inequities for countless Black and other racially minoritized youth. In Suspended Futures: Transforming Racial Inequities in School Discipline, Richard Welsh offers a timely, empirically rigorous, and practical intervention for educational researchers and practitioners to urgently address the inequities in exclusionary K-12 school discipline facing Black youth, by shifting from a student-focused to an educator-focused approach to school discipline reform.
Summary of Argument
The crux of Welsh's argument is the need for educational practitioners to adopt an educator-focused approach to address what he terms the “school discipline crisis” for Black youth in K-12 schools throughout the United States. He explains: The school discipline crisis—persistent differences in how White and Black students are disciplined—is not about how well these students behave but the consequential differences in how teachers, assistant principals, and principals perceive and respond to students’ behaviors (p. 3).
Across five chapters, drawing on prior literature reviews and original analysis of national data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), and administrative data from the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), Welsh illustrates not only why disparities in school discipline persist but how to disrupt and improve the educational and social realities of Black youth in K-12 schools. Welsh elucidates both the “why” and “how” educational practitioners should seek and work to disrupt the pervasive racial inequalities in school discipline, with particular attention to the use of office discipline referrals (ODRs), in-school suspensions (ISS), and out-of-school suspensions (OSS). In doing so, and through a profound advancement in educational research and practice, Welsh proposes an original, multifaceted, and evidence-based approach to disrupting school discipline disparities: the Transforming School Discipline Strategic Framework (TSDSF). The TSDSF, and the book as a whole, offer educational practitioners an invaluable framework and various strategic and practical recommendations to address the school discipline crisis for Black youth in K-12 schools.
Summary of Contents
Suspended Futures: Transforming Racial Inequities in School Discipline comprises several chapters that situate the school discipline crisis and provide key recommendations to prepare and support educational practitioners to address the inequities in exclusionary K-12 school discipline. In Chapter 1, “Stuck in Punitive Sands,” Welsh traces the persistence of racial inequity in school discipline from the 1970s to the present. By examining the use of ISS and OSS through multiple waves of CRDC data, school district reports from across the United States, and recent literature reviews, he demonstrates how “the school discipline crisis is both historical and contemporary” (p. 22). Specifically, Welsh shows that Black youth have consistently experienced the highest suspension rates nationwide, even as the overall use of exclusionary discipline has declined in recent years. Chapter 2 introduces the TSDSF as an analytical tool, practical intervention, and a call to action “intended to expose and target—to identify the tentacles of anti-Blackness in the disciplinary process and attack the structural roots of discipline disparities” (p. 54). Welsh outlines and explains the sequential steps of implementing the TSDSF as an interventionist approach to disrupt school discipline disparities.
Chapters 3 through 5 operationalize the TSDSF through original empirical research based on a vast administrative data set from the NYCDOE to examine the relationship between school personnel, school climate, and school discipline. In Chapter 3, “It's the Adults, Stupid,” Welsh conducts a series of logistic regression analyses to conclude that school personnel—defined as classroom teachers, school administrators, and school support staff—are central actors in disrupting and/or reproducing school discipline disparities. Chapter 4, “Setting the Right School Climate,” analyzes surveys from students, teachers, and parents in NYCPS to highlight the significance of school climate in disrupting school discipline disparities. Chapter 5 provides a more in-depth exploration of the NYCPS data set, leveraging observations and interview data from two Inclusive Disciplinary Schools (IDSs) (i.e., schools with low rates of and disparities in exclusionary discipline for Black youth) to investigate the use of asset-based and inclusive approaches to discipline practices at the school and school district levels.
Strengths
Suspended Futures: Transforming Racial Inequities in School Discipline offers several strengths for advancing theoretical and practical approaches toward disrupting disparities in school discipline for Black youth in K-12 schools. As Welsh urges in the concluding chapter: We must understand that anti-Blackness in school discipline manifests as a malaise among Black students. These understandings urge us to break the cycle by reframing student misbehavior as a justifiable resistance to anti-Black racism and hostile schooling environments instead of an innate propensity to misbehave or a result of traumatic non-school related experiences out of educators’ and school leaders’ control (p. 149).
Toward this end, Welsh's work offers profound insights for educational practitioners. First, the book draws on various national and local data sets, coupled with in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses, to depict the historical and contemporary realities of school discipline disparities across the United States. By clearly documenting these patterns, Welsh underscores the urgent need to address the school discipline crisis for Black youth. Second, Suspended Futures not only depicts the problems of school discipline disparities but also offers a multitude of solutions. Rather than offering a prescriptive or a “one-size-fits-all” solution, Welsh introduces the Transforming School Discipline Strategic Framework (TSDSF) as a flexible, institutionally focused approach for educational practitioners to ameliorate the structural conditions contributing to school discipline disparities. Finally, Welsh finds the often-elusive balance between theory and practice in books intended for educational practitioners. While theory and practice are not mutually exclusive, this book combines rigorous empirical scholarship with practical tenets, frameworks, and approaches that educational practitioners can implement as they seek and work to disrupt school discipline disparities for Black youth at the school and school district levels.
Limitations
Welsh, attuned to the similarities between who is suspended from K-12 schools and who is incarcerated in youth and later in adult detention facilities, begins the concluding chapter by observing: “At some point in history, educational stakeholders apparently became comfortable with school discipline resembling the criminal justice system” (p. 147). While Suspended Futures: Transforming Racial Inequities in School Discipline offers many key insights for educational practitioners to “shift from understanding to disrupting” programs, practices, and policies that result in profound school discipline disparity outcomes for Black youth compared to their white peers, the reform of current state-sanctioned K-12 schooling will not suffice. Abolition is the only way.
Specific to prison abolition, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) builds on André Gorz's (1967) conceptualization of non-reformist reforms to advocate for a shift away from reformist efforts toward “the possibilities of nonreformist reform—of changes that, at the end of the day, unravel rather than widen the net of social control through criminalization” (p. 242). In other words, and as it pertains to discipline disparities and discipline writ large in K-12 schools, how can educational actors (e.g., youth, parents and guardians, community members, teachers, administrators, support staff, researchers, and policymakers) engage in the dismantling of all forms of exclusionary discipline while working toward humane, liberatory, and community-based alternatives? Instead of seeking state and federal funding to reform K-12 school discipline, as Welsh proposes at the conclusion of his book, how can funding and other forms of institutional support be leveraged by key educational actors to (re)imagine and (re)configure K-12 schooling through abolishing all forms of exclusionary school discipline in favor of humanizing and community-based approaches rooted in care, harm reduction, and collective liberation? Ultimately, how can educational practitioners seek and work to abolish, rather than reform, not only exclusionary school discipline disparities but all forms of school discipline that surveil, criminalize, and punish Black youth, all youth of Color, and particularly multiply marginalized Black youth and youth of Color?
Implications
Welsh offers a multifaceted and evidence-based set of approaches to disrupt the K-12 school discipline crisis for Black youth in the United States. Yet these interventions remain situated within the carceral logics of K-12 schooling and existing exclusionary programs, policies, and practices. This interventionist approach is a great starting point for educational practitioners interested in disrupting the school discipline crisis for Black youth. However, as urban education expert Richard Milner (2021) urges, “Start where you are, but don’t stay there.” This book does just that; it offers a starting point for educational practitioners to begin to seek and work to disrupt the school discipline crisis that is pervasive to K-12 schooling, while also gesturing toward the need for deeper transformation. This raises critical questions about what it means to move beyond reform. How can we learn from youth, parents and guardians, community members, community-based organizations, and other key educational actors who are engaged in seeking and working to dismantle the pervasive carcerality that is ubiquitous in K-12 schooling and society in favor of non-punitive and non-exclusionary alternatives rooted in community care, harm reduction, and collective liberation? Ultimately, the implications of Welsh’s work points toward the necessity of shifting K-12 schooling away from punitive and exclusionary frameworks. Disrupting the K-12 school discipline crisis is not an individualistic endeavor, but requires collective movement-building toward (re)imagining and (re)configuring a society free from all forms of carcerality that is rooted in liberation for all.
Conclusion
Suspended Futures: Transforming Racial Inequities in School Discipline is an invaluable book for all educational researchers and practitioners. Education scholars should build on Welsh's empirically rigorous approach that draws on both quantitative and qualitative methods to not simply understand the “school discipline crisis” facing Black youth in urban K-12 schools, but to offer expansive frameworks toward alternative possibilities rooted in seeking and working toward collective liberation for Black youth and all multiply marginalized youth of Color. Educational practitioners—from classroom teachers to school administrators and school support staff—should peruse this book and apply their learning to their work with youth to seek and work toward abolishing all forms of carcerality that are pervasive in urban K-12 schools. Overall, as youth of Color in urban schools, and particularly Black youth with multiply marginalized intersecting identities, continue to be disproportionately excluded from school, and as a result, increasingly pushed into youth and later adult detention facilities due to various carceral policies, practices, and ideologies, Welsh offers an invaluable resource to disrupt this troubling reality. Ultimately, Suspended Futures, and the various resources it offers, comes with a call to action that demands a disruption of the oppressive K-12 schooling experiences for Black youth in favor of a liberatory present and future reality. As Welsh posits on the last page of the book, educational researchers and practitioners must address this “civil rights travesty…for the lives of millions of Black children whose dreams and futures are suspended as the society of yesterday continues to shape the society of tomorrow” (p. 165). Literally and figuratively, Black lives depend on it.
